Charlie Munger Quotes

All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there.

The principal job of an academic administration is to keep the people who don’t matter from interfering with the work of the people who do.

Always take the high road, it's far less crowded.

Man’s imperfect, limited-capacity brain easily drifts into working with what’s easily available to it. And the brain can’t use what it can’t remember or when it’s blocked from recognizing because it’s heavily influenced by one or more psychological tendencies bearing strongly on it … the deep structure of the human mind requires that the way to full scope competency of virtually any kind is to learn it all to fluency — like it or not.

Or, in his own words: “What I’m against is being very confident and feeling that you know, for sure, that your particular action will do more good than harm. You’re dealing with highly complex systems wherein everything is interacting with everything else.

Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.

And the models have to come from multiple disciplines — because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.

There’s another type of person I compare to an example from biology: When a bee finds nectar, it comes back and does a little dance that tells the rest of the hive, as a matter of genetic programming, which direction to go and how far. So about 40 or 50 years ago, some clever scientist stuck the nectar straight up. Well, the nectar’s never straight up in the ordinary life of a bee. The nectar’s out. So the bee finds the nectar and returns to the hive. But it doesn’t have the genetic programming to do a dance that says straight up. So what does it do? Well, if it were like Jack Welch, it would just sit there. But what it actually does is to dance this incoherent dance that gums things up. A lot of people are like that bee. They attempt to answer a question like that. And that is a huge mistake. Nobody expects you to know everything about everything. I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge. To me, they’re like the bee dancing its incoherent dance. They’re just screwing up the hive.

It's an effective sales technique in America to put a foolish projection on a desk. And if you're an investment banker, it's an art form.

... much of what is taught in modern corporate finance courses is twaddle.

Warren talks about these discounted cash flows. I’ve never seen him do one.

If you minimize objectivity, you ignore not only a lesson from Darwin but also one from Einstein. Einstein said that his successful theories came from “curiosity, concentration, perseverance, and self-criticism.” And by self-criticism, he meant the testing and destruction of his own well-loved ideas.

In my life, I avoid things that are stupid, evil, or make me look bad in comparison with someone else.

If you don’t get this elementary, but mildly unnatural, mathematics of elementary probability into your repertoire, then you go through a long life like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

Some of the worst dysfunctions in businesses come from the fact that they balkanize reality into little individual departments, with territoriality and turf protection and so forth. So if you want to be a good thinker, you must develop a mind that can jump the jurisdictional boundaries. You don’t have to know it all. Just take in the best big ideas from all these disciplines. And it’s not that hard to do.